Hello reader and welcome to my third chapter reviewing the state of education in the United States. Chapter one reviewed the challenges parents face and the freedom of choice issue that affects education. The second chapter focused on teacher myths. I truthfully admit as a seasoned educator in my fourth decade of teaching that I am a bit biased, but in all of my studies regarding education policy I can easily state that our lawmakers do not understand the actual philosophy of education.

Education is a social enterprise. It isn’t a capitalist enterprise. The students in education are human and they respond to a hierarchy of needs. They do not respond to a test score as motivation. The students are not motivated by NCLB, Common Core, Race to the Top, Merit Pay for their teachers, or whatever the capitalist (neoliberal paradigm) flavor of the month is sent down the pike from a state capital or DC. If you want students to learn better let’s start with some essential needs: food, shelter, clean clothes, and love. I will let you search food insecurity for children of America. It is a sad statistic. It doesn’t matter how good the teacher is, student’s won’t learn if these needs are not met.

Merit Pay is largely supported by the neoliberal Republican establishment. It is another systematic play to devalue public education using capitalist dogma. Marc Lampkin wrote an article supporting the idea that claims teachers lack motivation and schools need better recruitment strategies to get better teachers. https://riponsociety.org/article/is-merit-pay-for-teachers-good-yes/ Lampkin is a Republican Lobbyist with zero classroom or even administrative classroom experience. He is a lawyer. In his article there are zero quantitative or qualitative statistics for reference to support his argument. He just uses the same old, same old, capitalist jargon to evaluate a field he knows little about. Snarky comment: I went to school, so i’m an expert in schooling. From one Mark to a Marc. Education is a social enterprise not a capitalist one. Stop trying to put the square pegs in the round hole, cause there isn’t any profit there. I know, I’m just a music educator, but y’all’s merit pay ideas disregard John Dewey (Great American Education Philosopher.) We learn by doing, and the test you are using to support merit pay doesn’t really measure the doing.

Side note: (Opinion only) This is really the greatest problem with standardized testing as a whole. It doesn’t really test working knowledge.

There is an article in Forbes Magazine by Peter Green that sums up the counterargument well. Where are school districts going to find the extra money for merit pay? Charge Parents? Tax the Rich? (See what I did there? My bias admittedly) Schools are dependent on tax dollars. It is a 100% social program, as it should be. Education benefits all of society. Then there is the whole test thing. How are you going to make sure every teacher is treated objectively? As a music teacher how are you going to assess me with a fill in the dot oval test? Without musicing? The doing of learning? How about an art or physical education teacher? I repeat: education is a social enterprise, not a capitalist one. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2022/08/16/why-merit-pay-will-not-work-for-teachers-ever/

Let’s go back to Lampkin’s motivation argument. Are there teachers who are less motivated? Sure. Administrators have evaluation and professional development rubrics to deal with unmotivated teachers. Are there lawyers who are less motivated? Yes. They end up not practicing law after a while, because no one hires them. Two different metrics at play… apples and oranges…

I have this conversation quite often with younger teachers. You will work harder in the first ten years of your career. In those first ten years you are learning the craft and art of teaching. You are developing your delivery of curriculum methods. The next ten to fifteen years will be your most productive as you will test the baseline of your delivery and perform action research with new methods. The final ten to fifteen you will work harder trying to understand the new generation (How to reach them personally, rather than planning lessons.) When someone from outside sees you at any of these points without context they may say you are working hard, or hardly working. I’m in my last ten to fifteen years. Teaching music is easy. Reaching my students is hard. As a child of the 70’s and 80’s technology was something you saw on TV. Today kids have technology in their hands that could land the lunar module on the moon. So… merit pay as a social motivator won’t work as Lampkin thinks it will since it will lack context.

Final issue. Evaluating a teacher based on a student’s test score. Let’s draw some capitalist comparisons.

1. A dentists success shall be determined by the number of cavities his patients have. They can charge more money if their patients have fewer cavities.

2. Defense attorney’s success determined by number of acquittals. They can collect their fees for an acquittal, but receive nothing for a guilty verdict.

3. A CEO’s salary is based on his employees satisfaction rating rather than profits from sales.

Are you laughing? This is the same expectation as evaluating a teacher for merit pay by the test an eight year old may take that has dirty clothes, five hours of sleep (since they wet the bed,) and no breakfast. <– This happens more often than one thinks.

One last time… Education is a social enterprise… so it goes…